Bao Maohong
Africa is an important and indispensable organic part of the world's environmental history. In the study of African environmental history, the study of Environmental History in South Africa is undoubtedly at the forefront. Compared with the environmental history research in other regions of Africa, which is mainly promoted by foreign scholars, the study of environmental history in South Africa is a two-legged walk, and local scholars and foreign scholars work together to make it not only resonate with the international environmental history research symphony, but also contribute to the achievements and uniqueness of South Africa. American scholar Nancy Jacobs's "Environment, Power and Injustice: A History of South Africa" is a moving chapter in this symphony.
visual angle
In 2003, two important books were published almost simultaneously in the field of South African history, namely William Bennett, cecil Rhodes Chair Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford, England, "The Rise of Environmental Protection in South Africa: Colonists, Livestock and the Environment, 1770-1950", and Nancy Jacobs, assistant professor at Brown University in the United States, "Environment, Power and Injustice: A History of South Africa". William was a new generation of leading figures in the study of South African social and environmental history, having previously published The Political Economy of Pondolan (1860-1930) (monograph) and Environment and History: A Comparison of Domesticated Nature in the United States and South Africa (co-author). From his academic trajectory and context, it can be seen that when he received his PhD from the University of London under the guidance of Shuna Marcos in 1979, he was deeply influenced by the social history of the British left, focusing on the study of social differentiation and resistance in rural South Africa. However, in the process of studying the emergence and development of rural migrant workers, it has gradually emerged that racial discrimination and State power are not the only causes of rural impoverishment, but also the natural environment and access to resources. Following this line of thought, he shifted from social history research to environmental history research, and organized several seminars on the platform of the journal Southern African Studies to explore the environmental roots of rural resistance and the ideological origins of environmental protection. The Rise of Environmental Protection in South Africa is the culmination of an in-depth study of environmental history. Nancy received her Ph.D. in history from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1995, and Environment, Power, and Injustice: A History of South Africa was fleshed out from her doctoral dissertation. Unlike William's path from social history to environmental history, there is no strong tradition of social history research in the study of South African history in the United States, but the study of environmental history in the United States that emerged in the early 1970s showed a social shift in the late 1980s, especially in the study of urban environmental history, with special emphasis on race, class, and gender. Nancy's doctoral supervisor, Phyllis Martin, is not good at South African history or environmental history, but she studies the history of Brazzaville's cities and the history of women in the Belgian Congo. To some extent, she is also a practitioner of the "fragmentation" of American history to the study of African history. Under her guidance, Nancy naturally studied the history of South Africa from a new trend in the study of environmental history in the United States. It can be seen that although the academic traditions of american, British, and South African history research are different, they all go to the same destination and move towards a research path that combines social history and environmental history.
However, unlike the social shift in american environmental history research, Nancy extended the time span to pre-industrialization, shifting the keyword from Justice to Injustice. That is, long before colonial rule, there was an injustice in the appropriation and use of natural resources in African society, and on this basis, social differentiation was formed, mainly reflected in the division of class and gender. After the colonial invasion, with the white occupation of the upper reaches of the river and the location of the springs, the racial dimension was added to the social differentiation. The way people in different groups use resources and environments, that is, the mode of production and the way of reproduction, are also very different. In both processes, power is both a hub that connects people and the environment and a key to changing human relations. In other words, when Nancy drew on the existing research results of American environmental history, she also combined it with Kuruman's history to form her own unique perspective of social and environmental history.
Unlike domestic studies of African history, they all adopted a local history perspective. William focused on Karoo and the Eastern Cape, while Nancy focused on Kuruman in northwestern South Africa, near the Kalahari Desert. Britain is an old colonial empire, in its study of South African history, has formed a paradigm of colonial history, imperial history, republican history, liberal history, and new social history, etc., the content of research has gradually shifted from white people in South Africa (Afrikaners and white British) to indigenous, the area of study has changed from white cities and farms to black reservations, and the scope of research has changed from the overall (partial) History of South Africa represented by whites to regional history. In other words, the study of regional history is the need and result of the deepening and concretization of historical research in South Africa. Since his doctoral dissertation, William has focused on areas where peasant revolts are more intense, and on the basis of paying attention to drought and disease, he has gone deep into the local environment, excavated from the vertical perspective, and constructed an environmental history that reflects the local customs and customs, integrates the environment, production, society, science and protection. Of course, the selection of regions is based on the theme to select the most typical place, so that regional history research can reflect the universality, and then form a representative Environmental History of South Africa. This is the path to understanding the well-equipped finches by dissecting sparrows. Due to the U.S. sanctions against the racist government of South Africa and the ambivalence (the tension between political correctness and the objectivity of historical research) among American scholars in studying South Africa, the U.S. study of South Africa cannot be like that of the United Kingdom, but must take an American approach. Specifically, it is to take advantage of the obvious historical commonalities of frontier expansion in the United States and South Africa, reflect each other, and conduct a comparative study of frontier history. The frontier is not only a border area, but also a meeting area of different races, cultures, production methods, environmental views, etc. In contrast to the study of the history of the Frontier in the United States, the white hegemonic claims formed in South Africa were gradually dissolved. In contrast to the study of south African frontier history, the so-called "American spirit" also needs to be re-recognized. Although the study of environmental history in the United States is the result of the rise of the environmentalist movement and the differentiation of historical research, one of its academic origins is frontier historiography. In this academic background, Nancy naturally chose Kuruman, who was once a territory, as the base and object of her research. Geographically and environmentally, Kuruman is located on the edge of the Kalahari Desert and is an ecologically intertwined area. In terms of ethnic composition, it is a mixed area inhabited by Tswana and white colonizers. From the perspective of production and lifestyle, it is a transformation zone of hunter-gatherer, grazing and mobile farming and settled farming, mining and service economy. From a cultural point of view, it is the place where British colonial culture and African culture are contested by missionaries and colonial officials. Politically, it is an outpost of colonization and racial discrimination, segregation and "separate development" and anti-colonial and anti-segregation. From the 18th to the 20th century, scene after scene of vivid historical dramas in Kuruman, which is inconspicuous in traditional historical research, was staged one after another, changing, and the interaction of the environment and people.
Kalahari Desert
frame
The book is divided into nine chapters, of which the first chapter is the introduction, the ninth chapter is the conclusion, and the other seven chapters are basically arranged in chronological order. In terms of historical narratives, it can be roughly divided into four phases in chronological order: pre-colonial (before the arrival of the missionaries, chapter II), the frontier period (most of the 19th century, chapter THREE), the colonial period (from the 1880s to the establishment of the Union of South Africa, chapters IV and V), and the apartheid period (most of the 20th century, chapters VI, VII, AND VIII). Obviously, this is a historical period based on the entire history of South Africa. Specific to Kuruman's historical and research topics, this periodization needs to be appropriately adjusted, so that the periods covered by different chapters overlap from time to time, with stages according to political developments and stages according to the transformation of the mode of production.
In the first chapter, the author makes it clear that the goal of this book is to present the history of human-environment interaction by combing through rich materials, to show the history of human relations between people by studying the relationship between different groups of people and the environment, and then to construct Kuruman's social and environmental history, and to discover the dynamics behind the seemingly calm historical appearance. The reason why such a research topic was proposed is mainly due to two considerations. First, Kuruman is not paid attention to in both social history research and environmental history research. The fact that it has not been studied does not mean that Kuruman's history is not important, but rather that this place, which was previously not studied due to data and methodological constraints, is well worthy of further study, as it is a mixed and conflict zone of ecology, race, mode of production, culture, and political society. In addition, with the maturity and application of oral historiography and rural rapid assessment techniques, it became possible to study this place where archives alone were not enough for historical research. Second, whether it is the study of environmental history in the United States or the study of environmental history in Africa and the environmental history of South Africa, there are places where breakthroughs are needed, and Kuruman can be used as an example to promote the research of these three aspects. The study of African environmental history is full of "degraded narratives", which did play a positive role in promoting the rise of environmental history research, but it is itself a "conventional knowledge" that needs to be deconstructed, while also ignoring the resilience and adaptability of Africans and the environment. American environmental history research emphasizes the role of the environment that has been missing in previous historical studies, thus forming a new understanding of history, but this seems to have moved from one extreme to the other, although it strives to avoid falling into the trap of environmental determinism. Nancy hopes to balance this imbalance in American environmental history research through Kuruman's research, emphasizing that social differentiation shapes the relationship between different groups of people and the environment. Although the study of environmental history in South Africa has made progress in the history of natural resource utilization and natural disasters, the environmentalism of black and white people, and the history of urban environmental sanitation, because it is mainly born from revisionist historiography, its theoretical basis still stays in anthropocentrism, and does not see the intrinsic value of the environment. Through Kuruman's research, Nancy hopes to break through the practice of using the environment as a stage or background for human history, and then discover the agency of the environment in historical development, or turn the environment into a source of motivation for creating history with humans.
Judging from the content and structure of the book, the author has formed his own analytical framework. Largely an interactive network of environments, production, societies and states, it is power that is at the hub and connects the parties. Kuruman's environment is not only a natural organism consisting of climate, soil, water, flora and fauna, and mineral resources, but also a socio-cultural construct formed for political purposes, such as colonists and chiefs supported by racist governments, such as donkeys being built to form animals that lead to the degradation of pasture. As far as climate is concerned, it is neither static nor continuously dry, but changes cyclically. Due to social differentiation and changes in production, the reactions and perceptions of climate change are very different for different groups of people, in other words, the real changes in climate do not match people's feelings. In terms of water sources, the power to approach the upper reaches of a river or a spring largely influences the choice of production methods by different groups of people. It can be seen that the environment provides various possibilities for economic and social development, but which possibility will become a historical fact also requires the participation and joint action of countries, tribes and other power subjects, different types of producers, etc. Whether it is the pre-colonial African society or the mixed society after the colonizer invasion, there has been a differentiation based on the use of resources and the environment. Pre-colonial relations were expressed as relationships between heads and clans (hunters and herders) based on kinship, post-colonization as relations between white colonists and African heads and tribesmen, and apartheid periods as complex relationships between white government officials, white farmers, African chiefs, itinerant farmers, nomads and migrant labourers. Obviously, what links the environment to social differentiation is the mode of production, whether it is hunter-gatherer or grazing farming or mining, which is the product of the use of the local environment, but which ethnic group and which gender are engaged in which mode of production also need to take into account the factors of power and people. In addition, over time, different ethnic groups, genders, and classes engage in a certain mode of production not fixed, but on the contrary, it changes with the change of the position of different ethnic groups, genders, and classes in the power structure and the change of the amount of accumulated wealth. For example, African men have shifted from pre-colonial cattle herding, a wealth-wielding production method, to a post-colonial migrant labourer and a production method that helps farming. Societies were divided into clans, tribes and even kingdoms, while the incursions of the colonizers artificially undermined the historical process that had begun, imposed colonial power on the local people, and artificially created two countries, white South Africa and "Boptatswana" in the implementation of apartheid policies. The establishment of these countries has been accompanied by new artificial strata and different modes of production and social structures that use the environment. For example, in order to achieve apartheid and separate development, white South Africans artificially created black tribes and their chiefs and the system of public lands, which, with the help of white racists, exploited the fruits of the labor of tribal civilians on the basis of the public land system, and even seized their land and pastures; It can be seen from this that the role of the state and society in adjusting the relationship between people and the environment.
By analyzing Kuruman's more than 200 years of socio-environmental history using a network relationship structure, some new conclusions can be drawn. First, the Kuruman method of extensive production is adapted to the local environment, not as long as it is an intensive production method that adapts to the Kuruman environment. In other words, not intensive is good. Second, the change in the Kuruman mode of production cannot be understood as environmental destruction and decline, as the colonizers did, but should see the turning point in the crisis and the innovations that are nurtured in it. In other words, Africans have shown the resilience and creativity they deserve in the face of environmental and social pressures. Third, power is at the heart of Kuruman's socio-environmental history. Power not only reflects the structural inequalities of society, but also forms differences in the interaction between different groups of people and the environment, but also affects the value and moral judgment of different groups of people on specific historical events, and even appropriate power relations can improve or worsen the environment. Fourth, power shifts between different categories (class, gender, and race) as history progresses, changing its relationship to the environment (knowledge and practice). Fifth, the transfer of power from white to black does not quickly change Kuruman's environmental inequalities, but fundamentally lies in rediscovering the true traditions of Africans, deconstructing the artificial "traditions" created by racists, and then reinventing traditions, forming new power structures, and thus forming new ways of getting along with each other and between people and the environment.
Apartheid Museum of South Africa
historical data
For historical research and narrative, historical materials are the foundation. Without sufficient historical materials, it is impossible to construct a historical narrative; without a reasonable understanding of historical materials, it is impossible to construct a history with the characteristics of the times. As an interdisciplinary field of research, environmental history research requires not only the collection and use of traditional historical materials such as literature, but also the collection and utilization of non-documentary materials related to environmental change. Unlike the study of environmental history in other regions with rich literature, the study of environmental history in South Africa also collects and uses oral data through fieldwork and other means. The understanding of different sources and types of historical materials also needs to adopt the concepts of different disciplines and use the basic theories of different disciplines. All of this is fully reflected in Nancy's book.
Since Ranke historiography, archives have occupied the first important position in historical research. From South Africa to the United Kingdom, Nancy visited several archives and libraries (mainly the London Public Archives, the World Mission Collection of the Library of the University of London's Oriental and African College Library, the Cape Town Archives, the Pretoria National Archives, the Kuruman Moffat Mission Collection, etc.) and consulted a large number of archival documents. These archives are divided into three main categories: colonial documents, missionary letters, and documents managed by the apartheid government to manage and develop black homes. Colonial documents mainly provide important information about colonial mergers and colonial agricultural development in the late 19th century. Although missionary letters focus on missionary information, they also contain missionary-related accounts of natural disasters and the production and lifestyle of the native population. Apartheid Government documents, which deal mainly with the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, the Bantu Ministry of Management and Development, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Lands, etc., mainly document the apartheid and separate development policies, soil protection and improvement plans and their implementation. Although most of these archives have been preliminarily classified and the management of some archives has been computerized, finding parts of the vast archives that are relevant to the subject of your research is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also requires extensive knowledge of South African and Kuruman history and extreme sensitivity to the subject of your own research. Finding these historical materials does not mean that you can structure your own history. One of the biggest problems and challenges is that these historical sources are not specifically a record of the production and life of Africans, in other words, not of Africans, because Africans cannot speak for themselves. Identifying African voices in these biased historical sources requires critical use. The first is to restore the voice of Africans through careful identification of the backgrounds and prejudices of outsiders, and in the examination with the local social and natural environment at that time, especially the historical activities of production practice that reflect the historical initiative of Africans. The second is to analyze the content of these predominantly white archives "against its texture" to find the voices of Africans as opposed to white colonizers. Of course, missionaries and colonial officials and apartheidists are different, and there must be differences in the analysis. Although the voices of Africans can be partially restored through the use of appropriate technical means, archives are not direct information for Africans after all.
In the study of African history, access to direct information in most cases requires the use of methods of field surveys and oral historiography, as well as rapid rural evaluation techniques. In order to obtain first-hand information, Nancy conducted numerous field surveys and interviews on 16 work sites over an area of approximately 1,000 square kilometres, in 1991, 1994, 1997 and 1998. Field investigations can not only create an immersive feeling of the local environment and society, but also obtain a "insider vision" of observing the "other" through interviews, questionnaire surveys, living and producing with local people, etc., so as to obtain the most authentic and effective information. Since it is a survey and interview with contemporary people, most of the information obtained is mixed, and it is necessary to identify and determine its diachronic nature by comparing it with archaeological remains, documentary archives and other materials. In 1991, Nancy conducted 29 interviews, including individual interviews and questionnaires, in English and Tswana, sometimes with the help of local translators. In order to ensure the objectivity and diachronic nature of the content, she sometimes talks to the elderly with good memory, and sometimes asks the same questions to different people, and then identifies the consistency and difference in the expression of the same thing by different people. Oral historiography is relatively mature from theory to practice, and has become a commonly used method in the study of African history, but it is suitable for traditional historiography with a good memory tradition of ethnic origins, witchcraft legends, court lineages, king deeds and other traditional historiography concerns, showing a sense of powerlessness to resources and environment, production activities, etc.
The Rapid Rural Assessment Method, which emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1970s, was invented to solve the problem of inaccurate or invalid data in the design and implementation of development projects. In order to make a rapid and effective (relative to the previous long-term and ineffective) assessment of areas intended for the implementation of development plans, several preparations are required: collecting and browsing existing information (archives, annual reports, statistical materials, academic papers, etc.), learning local technical knowledge (soil, seasons, flora and fauna, agricultural practices, diet, etc.), identifying and using key indicators (e.g. soil color, birth weight, living conditions, etc.), and forming multidisciplinary research groups (e.g., agronomists, ecologists, environmental scientists). , partnering with social scientists, humanists, etc.), finding and using local researchers to assist in their work (farmers and herdsmen, teachers, businessmen, grass-roots officials, etc.), and identifying key local informants (local experts who can easily obtain information and organize local people to participate in interviews). After this knowledge and organizational preparation, work begins in four main ways: group interviews, guided interviews (no formal list of interview questions, but a chain of logically linked questions), direct observation (self-travel in order to correct the inherent prejudices of the locals), aerial observation and surveying. In order to be able to conduct her own investigation smoothly, Nancy also shared her own literature with the locals, and played an active role in fighting for compensation for the losses suffered during the apartheid system. This reciprocal approach, on the one hand, removes the local people's wariness of outsiders and, on the other hand, earns them the promise of permission to conduct interviews and use the materials. In 1997, Nancy conducted 42 group interviews, and in 1998, she conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and several group interviews with 24 people. Group interviews use ways that illiterate Africans can accept and understand, or draw pictures of changes in land-use scale, or use the number of beans to express the value of forage plants and the preferences of cattle, sheep, and donkeys for different types of forage. By cross-validating the results obtained by several sets, it is generally possible to obtain more objective conclusions. Then, through site surveys with agricultural experts and botanists and interviewees, the names and distribution ranges of plants and the extent of changes in the relationship between agricultural and pastoral production and the environment are determined. In group interviews, Nancy and her team focused on listening to the interviewees' discussions about social differentiation, changes in rainfall, diet structure, herd composition, proportion of grass and trees on pastures, livestock diseases, etc., while promptly asking the reasons behind different phenomena and perspectives. In addition, since these interviews are not written materials, they must be videotaped live, followed by notes, and after evaluating the information obtained, they are explained. The video records the time, place and scene of the interview, and the text is mutually corroborated, which can objectively show the true views of Africans. Compared to questionnaire-based surveys, rapid rural assessments are open-ended, with respondents less swayed by interviewers.
The study of the socio-environmental history of rural areas requires the restoration of baselines and changes in the natural environment, which requires the use of scientific data that is not commonly used in traditional historical research, such as climate and weather change records, aerial photographs of changes in the ground landscape, population and livestock population statistics, etc. The Kuruman region is a semi-arid region where rainfall is crucial for agricultural production and the lives of locals, who in interviews attribute their difficulties to an increasingly dry climate. Nancy found South Africa's record of precipitation since 1932 and asked meteorologists to conduct a professional analysis and found that precipitation did not decrease significantly from 1932 to 1997, but there was a 20-year cycle. This finding shows that precipitation is not the main or decisive factor affecting local agricultural production, but on the contrary, spring water and groundwater have a huge impact on the production and livelihood of farmers and herders. The fact that locals feel that the weather is getting drier is actually an expanded projection of nature's response to the increasing hardships of life, a cultural construct worth studying. After the apartheid period, the white South African government established indigenous reservations in the Kuruman area through forced relocation and reform movements. Previously judged primarily through oral history, the effects of apartheid policies and practices on the local environment and the way Africans produced, Nancy collected aerial photographs taken by the Survey Bureau in 1958, 1965, 1972 and 1981 and asked experts to help identify and interpret them. Intensive cultivation by whites was found far from the acacia-overgrown river valleys, while vegetation around black settlements was sparse and gravel exposed; near black settlements after the implementation of the improvement plan, pastures were overgrazed and thinning and even more bushy bushes. From the comparison of these aerial photographs of different years, it is intuitive to see that black settlements and reserves did not turn to intensive production, but instead the vegetation degradation of pastures occurred. At the same time, cattle breeders linked the increase in donkey feeding to the scrubbing of pasture vegetation, believing that donkeys had destroyed the pasture, so they wanted to reduce the number of donkeys. This explanation is based on the outdated succession of pasture ecology and the top theory, that is, cattle ranches are top communities, and excessive donkey breeding destroys grasslands, resulting in overgrowth, resulting in ecological succession. This stable top community does not conform to the evolution of vegetation in semi-arid areas, in fact, change is a normal natural phenomenon, and stability is only a temporary accidental phenomenon. In this process, as rainfall, soil type and moisture, space, etc. change, the grass-to-tree ratio on the pasture will naturally change. In other words, this change is not mainly caused by human factors, but is normal and cannot be summarized by degradation.
In short, the study of the social and environmental history of South Africa requires not only the collection of written and graphical materials, but also the field research to obtain intuitive feelings. More importantly, all these materials must be interpreted using appropriate technology and the latest theories, so as to construct a new type of history with the characteristics of the times that is different from the past.
significance
As mentioned earlier, Environment, Power, and Injustice is a socio-environmental history based on Kuruman and a focus on South Africa, Africa, and the United States. Such research not only complements and refines existing theories, but also provides a baseline and enlightenment for the future development of Kuruman and South Africa.
In her research, Nancy used the definitions and theories of environmental history from Donald Worcester and Caroline Maisseter, important representatives of American environmental history research. Worcester argues that environmental history studies the history of the role and place of nature in human life because there is almost no history in previous natural studies and almost no nature in historical studies. Specifically, the three aspects of environmental history research are how nature evolves, how the economy interacts with nature, and how people perceive nature. Maisett adds a gender dimension to environmental history, emphasizing the relationship between human reproduction and nature. The specific research path is the agro-ecological history advocated by Worcester. Theoretically, these three dimensions are not determinism from nature to technology to consciousness, but open relationships placed in the context of concrete space-time. Among them, both natural pattern shifts and mode shifts of production and consciousness will affect each other, and their weights vary depending on the specific problem. From the perspective of research practice, Worcester pays more attention to the relationship between capitalism as an economic culture and the ecology of the Great Plains, especially the changes in top communities, and believes that dust storms cannot be regarded as pure natural phenomena, and capitalism is the main cause of dust storms. But Nancy's research does not stay within Worcester's framework, but is enriched by the expansion of Kuruman's study of socio-environmental history. First, it goes back vertically to the pre-colonial era, analyzing the relationship between African agricultural production and the environment and the gender division of labor based on production, which transcends the time limits of capitalism; second, it introduces the concept of power and the state horizontally, forming a comprehensive analysis of the environment, politics, economy and society; third, when analyzing the changes in the relationship between people and the environment and between people in Kuruman, it emphasizes the role of power without ignoring the factors of natural change.
Donald Worcester
In studying the relationship between population growth and agricultural development, Nancy took Esther Bosserup's theory of development as a starting point. According to Bosserap, population growth is not the result of agricultural development, but rather a variable independent of food supply. The main way to promote agricultural development is the intensive production of the entire land of a tribe or village. Demographic pressures are the main cause of changes in land use, agricultural technologies, tenure systems and settlement patterns. As the population grows, land use undergoes a shift from extensive to intensive production, notably in the shortening of the fallow period for mobile farming, to the point of becoming settled farming or even two or more ripening a year. At this time, total production is rising, but per capita production is declining, and people's leisure time is shortening. With the change of production methods, agricultural production technology has also developed from using point-of-point sticks to hoes to ploughs, and land ownership has gradually changed from collective ownership to private ownership. Although per capita production declines as the population increases, the size and total volume of the entire agricultural economy grows. In other words, in traditional agricultural societies, population growth drives agricultural development. Moreover, in economic development, women are often marginalized and do not benefit from development. Bosserap believes that development should move away from narrow perceptions measured solely by income increases and towards a new understanding that focuses on the well-being and creative play of all people, including women.
By studying Kuruman's socio-environmental history, Nancy revised Boserup's classical interpretation to some extent. First, she introduced environmental factors in her observation of shifts in production patterns, rather than explaining them in terms of population growth alone. The environment offers the possibility for different groups of people to develop their own production patterns, with intensive farming in semi-arid areas with scarce water and phosphorus scarce, and intensive production methods in the upper valleys and near springs, but the reality of racial inequality makes it possible only for white farmers and still not for Africans. Second, environmental constraints are not absolute, but more importantly, state power and linkages with the external economy have largely limited the improvement of technology and business methods in agricultural production. Even after the reform and settlement plans, large numbers of Africans were concentrated on reservations and in black homes, and the ratio of population to land rose sharply, but there was no transition from extensive to intensive, as predicted by Bosserap. While irrigation offered the possibility of overcoming drought, the separate development policies of racist governments had hindered the transition of Africans to intensive production. The essence of separate development was to turn the reservation and the black homeland into the labor base needed by the white economy. Although the use of fertilizers could improve soil fertility, the state provided only financial support for agriculture to white farmers, and Africans were not only impoverished, but also had no financial support from the government. African men mostly enter the mining areas for wage labor or enter the cities to engage in service industries, and African women do not have a strong incentive to promote the conversion of extensive agricultural production to intensive agricultural production because of the change in the main economic resources of the family and the low labor intensity of extensive production. Third, intensive production is not necessarily more advanced than extensive production, and the relationship between the two is not a linear substitution relationship, but a juxtaposition relationship. In fact, Africans choose extensive production not because they do not use advanced production technologies, not because they are lazy and unwilling to invest more labor in production, but because they understand the local environment, know how to get along with the local environment, know what technology is best for the local environment, and know how to get the food they need with low risk and labor. In other words, from an African perspective, whether extensive or intensive, it is good to be appropriate for the local environment and to reduce risk.
In studying the environmental history of Kuruman during apartheid, Nancy borrowed from Mahmud Mamudani's theory of the relationship between the colonial state and the tribe. The "cultural shift" in American environmental history introduces race, class, and gender into the study of environmental history, but focuses primarily on environmental inequality and ecological racism in cities. Mamudani, who studies African history, believes that the power of industrialized countries is mainly in cities based on civil society, and its role is to protect civil rights, but the power of the african colonial state was artificially constructed by the colonizers, and it is the power of racism that forces the invented tribes to implement certain invented traditions or customs. In the process of colonial economic development, migrant workers from rural Africa, although partially freed from the shackles of tradition or custom, did not become urban citizens, but instead became wanderers in the racist legal system who could not settle in cities. In rural Africa, man-made tribes and chiefs became accomplices to racist rule and defenders of traditions or customs invented. In the study of African history, many of the traditions that have been made traditional are not the cultures inherent in Africa, but the inventions of colonizers to establish and consolidate colonial powers, just as Europeans invented traditions. The African tribes that were invented were static, hierarchical, and elderly. In this tribe, traditions must be observed, including land sharing, orderly growth and childhood, distinction between men and women, and distinction between inside and outside. This tradition is essentially not to restore the true traditions of Africa, but to transplant the traditions invented by Europe to Africa, thus creating a human basis for the formation of European domination. These studies have to some extent revealed the nature and techniques of colonial rule in Africa.
Nancy applied Mamudani's theory to the study of Kuruman's socio-environmental history, enriching and expanding its explanatory power. Apartheid was the most extreme form of colonialism. The apartheid system in South Africa went through three stages of racial discrimination, apartheid and separate development, with the goal of turning the vast majority of the population into incomplete foreigners on South African soil, i.e., nominally independent states, but in fact under the control of the white South African Government in terms of economy, politics, military and diplomacy. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to create one African tribe after another and form a tradition conducive to apartheid. This tribe gradually evolved into an "African nation" in separate development periods. Where do such invented institutions and habits stand in environmental history? What role did it play?
The chiefdom of the Kuruman region was eliminated by the Cape colonies as early as the late 19th century, and Africans were transformed economically into private property and politically into free elections. But after the Anglo-Boer War and the subsequent establishment of the Union of South Africa, the policy of the Cape Colony was replaced by a policy of apartheid. With the promulgation of the Indigenous Lands Act and the Indigenous Affairs Management Act, among others, the Federal Government of South Africa established chiefdom in the Kuruman region. Although the current chieftain is related by blood to the previous chief, his ruling ideology and institutional framework are entirely designed and implemented by the Federal Government of South Africa. In other words, this chiefdom is no longer indigenous chiefdom, but a tool in the service of apartheid. Under the jurisdiction of chiefs, it was ruled by customary law, but customary law was also invented according to the will of the colonizers. These chiefdoms and customary laws, cloaked in the cloak of tradition, actually formed a new African-environment relationship, in which the previously formed practice of blacks buying and holding land was completely outlawed and replaced by communal land on reservations under the control of chiefs, and the possession of river valleys and cattle as wealth became the prerogatives of chiefs and their ruling classes, while the broad masses could only cultivate and raise donkeys on barren and limited lands. The establishment of this indirect mode of rule has turned whites and African chiefs into the same class to a certain extent, African chiefs have become the agents of the South African Federation in black reservations, the representatives of advanced productive forces, on the contrary, the African people have become the rulers who are completely divorced from the original reciprocal relationship, and have become the practitioners of backward productive forces, which is highlighted by the destructive use of the environment, such as the excessive grazing of grass by donkeys, which causes surface desertification, and extensive production is not conducive to improving land use efficiency. Africans resist reform and settlement programs against environmental protection, among other things. After the implementation of separate development plans, especially after the "independence" of Boptatswana, the contradictions between the African people and the chieftain class intensified, and eventually evolved into a large-scale donkey killing with no factual basis. Although cattle far outnumber donkeys, and cattle demand more from the grass than donkeys, the chiefs who raised cattle joined white racists in inventing the myth that over-raising donkeys led to the degradation of pastures and resorted to extremely brutal killing methods to solve their fictitious problems. Obviously, this approach is not actually all about donkeys, but also uses environmental issues to create a deterrent and demonstration of power for Africans, thus quelling Africans' resistance to apartheid.
Kuruman's example shows that apartheid was established by inventing traditions. Both chiefdom and customary law are the result of segregation in the name of tradition and apartheid. In analyzing this event that has had a profound impact on African history, the perspective of environmental history can reveal the artificially constructed nature of the relationship between people and the environment behind this fiction. The relationship between the reservation and the black homeland was not the result of natural development, but was constructed by the apartheid government in conjunction with tribal chiefs, and the maintenance of this artificially constructed relationship was largely accomplished through the use of state power. In the process, African peoples and their production and lifestyles have been fictitiously portrayed as environmentally destructive "conventional common sense", which in turn provides the theoretical basis for improvement programs such as forced relocation and centralized housing, and this transformed relationship between people and land not only fails to protect the environment, but instead pushes the apartheid system to extremes in the context of environmental degradation. In other words, the relationship between Africans (chiefs and civilians), apartheidists, and the environment was so distorted by power that it strengthened the apartheid system while preparing the environmental and social foundations for its downfall. Obviously, Nancy revealed the extremes of Mamudani's general theory by studying Kuruman's case, and demonstrated the complexity and contradiction between power, the environment, and race through the study of the relationship between people and land under apartheid.
In short, Nancy's "Environment, Power and Injustice" is a book with a unique perspective, rich content and inspiration, a book that cannot be bypassed when studying environmental history and social history, and it is worth paying attention to and learning from Chinese researchers of South Africa, African history, environmental history and social history.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Luan Meng